Democracy

All over the world we are all still in pursuit of the past. When one looks at striking workers in Greece, France, China, South Africa, what we see are not empowered people but people making demands on government, people demonstrating their inability to control their own destinies.Government has become an entity in opposition to the people. What we should be doing, not just in South Africa but all over the world, is interrogating what government means and where power truly lies.

I do not believe that politicians are in control. They represent an obvious token of power but the real power is with those who control the economy and with those who can turn their enterprises into big business, such as FIFA.That is why there is so much corruption in government; they have become puppets in the hands of real power. Why else has Barack Obama lost support in the USA.He has the backing of the people but not those whose interests he is challenging. He cannot bring the troops home from Iraq because he has no real power to do so.The real power lies elsewhere – in the hands of the capitalists.If we look at Zimbabwe, Mugabe has political control but the economy has collapsed.Why?Not simply because of corruption, a symptom of the problem, but because he no longer has the support of those who manipulate the world’s wealth.Though we give credit to all the freedom fighters who brought down the apartheid government, it is time to recognise that the economic onslaught on the Nationalist government is what really forced De Klerk into negotiations with the ANC.Now the ANC government in South Africa is in a similar position. It has no real power. Like all other African countries, it is at the mercy of the financiers of the world.And economic powers like India and China are taking over African countries.

The cry for democracy worked during the French Revolution, before industrialisation, but has now become an expression of nostalgia.Democracy is a passé ideal.We live in the real world. And the word ‘democracy’ is the real opiate of the masses. Democracy was never a dispensation for the majority, even in Ancient Greece. Liberty, Fraternity and Equality apply only within the capitalist brotherhood that controls the world.